A Sonnet For Death

I know that there are plenty other things to write about – first love, summer rains, an anecdote, insomniac musings, fair and unfair, pride and prejudice, meaning of life, life beyond death, physics and metaphysics, system and anarchy, God and evil, but I choose to write about death. There is a certain moral obligation on you, when you write about death; to make the reader cry when they laugh and laugh when they cry, to induce euphemism in every second line, to tone down the overwhelming intensity and harshness, to make their heart ache and satisfy their masochistic desires with abysmal tranquillity of pain and loss, and then obliterate the pain by rewriting about life, to imbibe the lesson of inspiration and hope in the end, to heal the wounds inflicted by your own words and to wipe the caked blood on their skin to reveal the scars.

Yes, I have that obligation too, but I choose to ignore it, because I am writing about death. Death is the only sonnet I found that has every colour of the rainbow in its ledger. It has blood on it, blood of maimed hearts, scorched wounds, ill organs and dysfunctional bonds. It has purple aura of doom and despair in it because it’s the door to nothingness, to a void of loss, to oblivion. It also has fear in it – the fear of loss, the fear to forget and to be forgotten. Death has ability to invite disgust and repulsion in you, when the very thing you once loved lays twisted and demented in front of you. Death can also make you fall in love, with the same person and concept all over again, because death teaches you to love via memories, and since you love through the source of memories, it teaches you to forgive and forget – because human memories are treacherously misleading. Death is the real-life personification of irony because it forces you to not speak bad for the dead, the same dead you spent their entire life condescending them. Death is also paradox – because every time you breathe, you are not living but you are moving an inch closer to death. This is what death has shown me and I am glad that I chose to see it. That is why I choose to write about death – because someone has to.